MARXISM 2013 CONFERENCE

I am pleased to be able to speak at next year’s Marxism 2013 Conference. There will also be speakers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Sri Lanka as well the US and elsewhere.

The website for the Marxism 2013 Conference, organised by Socialist Alternative as a national/international conference in Melbourne, is nowup with information on the featured speakers and topics to be covered in the programme. You can also by tickets via the website.

Renowned investigative journalist John Pilger to speak at Marxism 2013

We are excited to announce the return for a fifth consecutive year of investigative journalist John Pilger. This year John will be speaking on the topic of his new film on Australia, ‘Utopia’ and will continue his 2012 discussion on the dangers of ‘lifestyle socialism’.

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.

He regards eye-witness as the essence of good journalism. He has been a foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, beginning with the Vietnam War in 1967. He is an impassioned critic of foreign military and economic adventures by Western governments.

“It is too easy,” he says, “for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to ‘our’ interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present ‘our’ policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It’s the journalist’s job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society.”

He believes a journalist also ought to be a guardian of the public memory and often quotes Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Noam Chomsky wrote: “John Pilger’s work has been a beacon of light in often dark times. The realities he has brought to light have been a revelation, over and over again, and his courage and insight a constant inspiration.”

Harold Pinter wrote: “John Pilger unearths, with steely attention, the facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is.”